Chi Onwurah: I support and second the comments and contributions of my hon. Friend the Member for the City of Chester (Christian Matheson) and of my right hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Kevan Jones), who tabled new clauses 3 and 7. I would also like to congratulate the Committee on having made it through, as it were, the thickets of the Bill as it stands to the sunlit uplands of our new clauses, which are designed to improve it in a constructive and supportive way.
New clauses 3 and 7 both address the challenge of Ofcom’s resources. As Members of the Committee know, I joined Ofcom in 2004. I know that we are not allowed to use props in debates in the Chamber, but the Communications Act 2003, which I am holding in my hand, is the Act with which the Bill is concerned. The changes that the Bill makes are mainly adding to that Act.
When I joined Ofcom in 2004, the Act was about half the size it is now. I am grateful to the Vote Office for printing and binding the enlarged Act which, as I said, is about double the size it was when I joined Ofcom. That is because—my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester alluded to this—Ofcom has acquired responsibility for critical national infrastructure, the BBC, the Post Office. What is not yet reflected in the Act is Ofcom’s soon-to-be-acquired responsibility for the entirety of our online existence, as reflected in an online safety Bill, which has yet to make its appearance but has the absolute commitment of the Minister’s Department.
This latest expansion of Ofcom’s duties will necessarily add a strain not only to its budget—I shall come on to address that briefly—but, most importantly, to its resources, as was referred to by my right hon. and hon. Friends. In January this year, a colleague of the Minister stated that Ofcom will have the resources that it needs to do its job. If that is the case, may I ask what objection the Minister has to Ofcom reporting to Parliament on the state of its resources, particularly as those resources will be very hard to come by. My right hon. and hon. Friends emphasised the fact that Ofcom lacks experience in national security measures, and that expansion of duties will require the recruitment of people with the required level of security clearance and experience.
We heard in the evidence sessions that that might be a challenge. Dr Alexi Drew said:
“I think what needs to be considered in that question is the type of resources that will be the hardest for Ofcom to acquire. I frankly believe it is not necessarily technology; I believe it is actually personnel. The edge that is given to companies that have already been mentioned in your hearings today—Google, Microsoft, Facebook et al—is not necessarily in the technology, but in those who design the technology. Those people are hard to come by at the level that we require them at. They are also very hard to keep, because once they reach that level of acumen and they have Google, Facebook or Amazon on their CV, they can pretty much choose where they go and, often, how much they ask for in the process.”––[Official Report, Telecommunications (Security) Public Bill Committee, 19 January 2021; c. 84, Q82.]
I just want to reiterate that the Bill must be forward-looking on security challenges. While we the existing architecture of our telecoms networks requires skills in certain aspects of technology—radio frequencies and so on—as the architecture moves more and more into the cloud and the software domain, those skills and CVs are going to be all the more scarce and difficult to obtain.
We also heard from Dr Drew that he was not sure whether Ofcom had the capacity to take on the sheer volume of work that was likely to be created. Finally, we heard evidence from Lindsey Fussell, Ofcom’s group director for network and communications:
“In relation to Ofcom’s costs, Ofcom is funded in two ways: first, by a levy on the sectors and companies that it regulates and, secondly, through the collection of fees, primarily from our spectrum duties. Our overall funding is obviously agreed by our board but also subject to a cap agreed with Government…We are currently in discussion with the Treasury about the exact technicalities and which of those routes will be used to fund this, but it will be in line with Ofcom’s normal funding arrangements.”––[Official Report, Telecommunications (Security) Public Bill Committee, 19 January 2021; c. 97, Q131.]